Stories of love, laughter, and magic…

I am SO EXCITED to share that my friend Melissa Bennett‘s debut novel, Hidden Thorns, is coming out later this month. It’s a genre-bending mash-up of suspense and inspirational romance! Here’s an interview with Melissa with some tantalizing secrets…check it out!

Ona Rathuna is a wondrous place, but there are many things about it that will be new and unfamiliar at first. Therefore, as I’m chronicling these stories (starting with Havenvale), I’m also putting together a Glossary. Here is one such entry. Underlined items will eventually have their own Glossary entries. Also eventually (and hopefully) there will someday be a wiki or web pages or even a separate website with the entire Glossary in/on it.

KIRI-FRUIT—

Small green fruit with orange seeds and a thin gray peel, derived from the tropical kiwi fruit, modified by magic to grow well in Havenvale’s temperate climate. High in tangy vitamin C and trace nutrients. Like all other tropical fruits, importing either the fruit or the trees was exceedingly time consuming and expensive until 592-597 AF, when Green Mage CYAN DACE (509 AF-618 AF) of Oxlaith Province modified the tree and several others to produce well in a colder, wetter climate. See also OLANGE, PIN-FRUIT, LIMM, LEMM, RED-CITRUS, MANGOLLO, PAPPI-YA, BANNA

Last night when I came home from a meeting, there was a bit of a mess on the dining/catch everything table, including a broken shrubbery from the gingerbread house. For some reason, this made me decide to get the Christmas napkins out of the holiday cupboard under the stairs.

Five hours later… both nativity sets are together in one box and labeled, all the Christmas candle holders are with the other, regular candle holders, all the stockings and Christmas hand towels have been washed, dried, and put in their Christmas-y places, and all the wrapping supplies are–gasp–together! This is not what I had on my schedule for today, but I’m actually really happy I got this done. We’re not quite ready to do the tree yet (or most of the decorating) for various relevant but boring reasons, but when we are ready, I will be able to find everything! Yay!

And yes, I found the Christmas napkins and put them out, too. As soon as I post this, I’m going to get one to use with my coffee while I do some editing, secure in the knowledge that–for the next week or so–all is as it should be with the Christmas decorations.

Happy holidays!

PS. I wrote this on December 11th and then didn’t post it. I’ve no idea why it didn’t get posted. Now it’s after Christmas, hardly any of the decorations went up, and we had a happy, lovely, joyful holiday anyway. I’m all set for next year, lol. Hope you had a lovely holiday season too!

Ona Rathuna is a wondrous place, but there are many things about it that will be new and unfamiliar at first. Therefore, as I’m chronicling these stories (starting with Havenvale), I’m also putting together a Glossary. Here is one such entry. Underlined items will eventually have their own Glossary entries. Also eventually (and hopefully) there will someday be a wiki or web pages or even a separate website with the entire Glossary in/on it.

SILVERWOOD—

A tree that grows only in the foothills of the Dovetop and Winterridge Mountains in deep soil next to ice-water creeks. The tree grows very slowly, producing extremely hard wood in very small quantities. Most years, the Foresters of Havenvale only cut a single branch from one tree, and never cut down entire trees. They keep a census and maps of the trees, and have been attempting to increase the population for several hundred years by cultivating the seedlings. They measure their success by how many cultivated seedlings root verses how many seeds root naturally in any given decade. In the last two decades they have had a remarkable increase in their success rates: 4% this decade verses 1% over the previous three decades.

Silverwood branches can only be made into a few shapes, but for maximum production, buttons are the norm. Silverwood can only be worked with diamond or sapphire-encrusted blades. The buttons on William’s coat the day he first barges into Sadie’s studio in Fated Bond are made from Silverwood.

Love this series. These are my absolute favorite characters. I wouldn’t want to have suffered what Anna had to suffer, but in Charles I think she got the best consolation prize ever. The rest of the cast is loaded with individuals with quirks and foibles and their own strong voices. A trek across a mountain in winter? Not my first choice of honeymoon, but Briggs makes it work! Total winner. A+